Gratitude and Light
As days grow shorter, we gather close with loved ones to give thanks and to celebrate the blessings in our lives.
Neighbors on my block have been meeting to prepare for a massive Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake (7.0-9.0+) that has a 37% chance of occurring in the next 50 years. Emergency preparedness guidance is that everyone be two weeks ready. This means having enough food, water, medical supplies, back-up power, etc. to last until services can be restored. It also means knowing our neighbors and being ready to help one another because first responders will be focused on hospitals, schools and commercial buildings. It is hard to get people to face a future threat with a long time horizon and high degree of uncertainty. There are only 3 blocks in my neighborhood of 1500 homes that have a plan.
What do earthquake preparedness and climate action have in common? It is hard to be in emergency mode and even harder to live in denial as climate disruption accelerates. How do we talk to loved ones who have withdrawn from facing scientific evidence and who don’t project accelerating change into the future? Many people go to bed every night counting on the next day being like today. We might comment on the unseasonably warm weather or commiserate about victims of fires, storms and floods. Or be dismayed over rising food prices as unpredictable weather reduces harvests. People who are concerned about climate change may feel powerless to affect a huge global system. Will my individual actions make a difference? At Minerva’s View, we try to connect the dots – to amplify the scientists and to elevate the solutions. We want to help you channel uncertainty into insight and anxiety into action.
We at Minerva’s View send holiday wishes for a transformative 2026.
Events
Climate Leaders Monthly Meeting
Thursday, December 18, 4:00 - 5:00 PM PT
Join the Climate Leaders Meeting to exchange resources and inspiration with others who are working to create a vibrant and healthy future.
All leaders are welcome.
This is a monthly on-line event hosted by Minerva Ventures.
The Best Ideas from COP30, the UN Climate Summit in Brazil
December 18, 2025 10:00 am PST - 11:30 am PST
Hosted by The Climate Center, with speakers Senator Josh Becker, Vinicius Sala, Allison Hilliard and Barry Vesser.
Good News Updates
Energy
Budderfly: Energy Efficiency as a Cost-Effective Service
Budderfly, Al Subbloie’s Energy-as-a-Service company, hit $200 million in revenue in 2024 while retrofitting thousands (more than 8,000 to date) of restaurant locations across the U.S. Restaurants like Five Guys, Taco Bell, Dunkin’, Zaxby’s, and McDonald’s. Budderfly brings franchise owners an offer they can’t refuse, replacing the HVAC, refrigeration, lighting, and controls with high-efficiency, digitally managed equipment — with zero upfront cost. The energy use falls by up to 40%, and Budderfly gets paid through a share of the monthly energy savings. The average restaurant reduces it’s carbon emissions 20% while saving money. Al Subbloie’s formula: “Find energy-intensive businesses with thousands of identical locations. Crack the code on one. Then rinse, repeat — and scale like crazy.” Read more.
“Balcony Solar” Is Finally Coming to the US
Already popular in Europe and other regions, small easy to install solar has faced serious permitting obstacles in the US. However, as federal support for solar wanes, states have begun looking for opportunities to increase access to inexpensive green energy. Bright Saver is a non-profit championing availability in the US. The panels can be installed with zip ties, plug into a wall socket via an inverter, and provide suffiencient energy to power most home appliances. They sell for the equivalent of about $300 in Germany, with more expensive versions for $1,500 or more that include battery storage.
Circular Economy/Materials
Recycling Success in Romania
In the two years since the system was launched, beverage-packaging collection and recycling has risen to 94%, collecting more than 500,000 tonnes of high-quality recyclable materials, most of which are reused. “We are the largest fully integrated deposit return system globally,” said Gemma Webb, chief executive of RetuRO, which runs the public-private partnership. The Romanian system uses modern software and traceability tools, and requires retail shops to either install reverse vending machines or process the packaging manually. They get a financial incentive that helps cover processing costs, and RetuRO reinvests all profits back into operations. Read more.
Water/Natural Resources/Biodiversity
Rewilding Success on a Farm in England
After four years of rewilding effort by Youngwilders, Maple Farm, previously a retirement home for horses, has become a showpiece for nature recovery, and has launched efforts that are expanding across the country. The organization, founded by a group of students, began with “the idea that there were people who were willing to let a bunch of young idiots on to their land,” according to co-founder Jack Durant, They put up a web site and starting making calls. Now with seven sites across England, they are providing a transformative opportunity both for young people, and for the land. Read more.
Built Environment
Schneider Electric’s AI Intelligence Layer for Buildings
Schneider Electric is a 190-year-old French hardware, software, and services company with a global footprint of more than a million buildings globally. It’s newest innovation, EcoStruxure Foresight Operation, is an AI platform that unifies every system in a building—HVAC, lighting, power, chillers—into a “brain that transforms the building from an inert object into a performance partner.” Foresight can tell you where the inefficiency is in a building in real time, and what to do about it. In the 1.8–million–square–foot office facility in Boston where Foresight is already operating, it has made the building 65% more energy efficient than comparable buildings. The next step, upgrade the 200,000 hospitals, hotels, laboratories, airports, data centers, and office buildings already part of the Schneider universe. Read more.
Transportation
EV Charing Buildout Resumes with Federal Funding
After a federal court overturned their suspension, funds from President Biden’s infrastructure program are once again powering EV charging stations in rural areas and underserved cities, with more than 40 states soliciting or signing contracts in recent weeks. According to Rick Wilmer, CEO of ChargePoint Holdings Inc., “It’s kind of a return to where it was before it was paused.” Read more.
Climate Interventions:
Regeneration, Methane, Geoengineering, CCUS
Ozone Layer On Track for a Full Recovery
The Montreal Protocol is “one of the most effective environmental treaties to date,” said Revell, who’s an associate professor at the University of Canterbury. Perhaps if we can do it for ozone, we can still somehow do it for carbon?
Adaptation and Resilience
Predictions of a Bleak Future
In February, in a report to the Senate Banking Committee, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned, “You know, if you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage,” he said. “There won’t be ATMs.” A recent lengthy piece in The Atlantic examines both the impacts already being seen, and how they point to climate change created “dead zones” where lack of assistance after climate disasters result in a bleak landscape of food deserts, fewer businesses, and hollowed out local government services, with people desperately attempting to relocate. Corporations are already taking advantage of “opportunities” in distressed areas, shifting residennces to rentals, privatizing essential services like firefighting, disaster response, and cleanup. Without drastic efforts to reduce carbon pollution we can look forward to mass drought in the Southwest and West, disrupted agriculture in the South, and delugesand flooding that may make areas from Miami to Sacramento to parts of New York City uninhabitable. Meanwhile the Trump administration has turned away from efforts to reduce emissions and those directed at adaptation and resilience. Impacts are already greatest in areas inhabited by the economically disadvantaged, and this will only get worse. And with fewer resources, they will be less successful at relocating to safer areas. Climate migration within the US and globally has already begun, and will only accelerate, as disasters strike and rebuilding expenses become unsupportable.
Policy
COP30 Concludes with an Imperfect Deal
After nearly ending with no deal at all, Ed Miliband, the UK energy minister, along with EU climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra held a private conversation with the chief Saudi negotiator, Khalid Abuleif. Saudi Arabia had been the main voice blocking consensus on language supporting a “transition away from fossil fuels.” Instead, they offered a reference to “the UAE consensus”, the name given to the Cop28 deal that did mention the move away from fossil fuels. The Saudis agreed, and the world “took another small step towards the phaseout of fossil fuels – a faltering, inadequate step, and one that will barely interrupt the climate’s steady march towards catastrophe. But a significant departure from total inaction nonetheless.” See more coverage in the Guardian.
Positive Developments at This Year’s COP
While the headlines weren’t inspiring, there were a number of positive commitments made at COP30, including:
More than 50 countries signed on to “Tropical Forests Forever,” an initiative that aims to turn forests into financial assets through an investment fund that rewards countries for protecting them, with an initial commitment of $5.5 billion.
A new focus on fire prevention through the Wildfire Action Accelerator Pledge.
Countries agreed to triple their support for developing nations to increase their resilience to climate change by 2035.
Through the Super Pollutant Country Action Accelerator, countries will share expertise on how to slash emissions of “super pollutants” such as methane and black carbon, which scientists say is the fastest way to slow climate change.
Senator Whitehouse on the COP
In a video of his 303rd “Time to Wake Up” speech from the Senate, Senator Whitehouse shared his experience as the sole US federal government representative in attendance. He focused on a few key points in his discussions there: Trump’s climate stance reflects his fossil-fuel donors, not the American public; the world must put a price on carbon and protect/expand the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which he calls the “last lifeboat”; a looming “great climate insurance collapse” threatens the global economy.
California State Senator Josh Becker at COP
The Senator represented California’s commitment to enacting strong climate policy, and spoke to recent steps taken by the legislature.
The World Post COP30
Speaking at POLITICO’s Sustainable Future Summit, Katarzyna Wrona, Poland’s negotiator iand member of the EU’s delegation at the summit said The European Union will “think twice” before considering backing weak agreements at future COP’s. Without US participation the geopolitics of this COP were very different. Elif Gökçe Öz, environmental counsellor at the permanent delegation of Turkey to the EU, said it would “be important for the EU ... to forge alternative alliances in the COP negotiation process,” as global power dynamics shift.
Colorado Sets a New Standard for Gas Utility Decarbonization
In a 2-1 vote the Colorado Public Utilities Commission decided that nvestor-owned gas utilities must cut carbon pollution by 41% from 2015 levels by 2035. THis new ruling is consistent with the state’s aim to decarbonize by 2050. Jim Dennison, staff attorney at the Sierra Club, one of more than 20 environmental groups that advocated for an ambitious target said, “It’s one of the strongest commitments to tangible progress that’s been made anywhere in the country.” Following Colorado’s lead, Massachusetts and Maryland are working on their own clean-heat standards. Read more.
Permitting Reform: Essential and Controversial
The Speed Act, an attempt to speed up one aspect of the permitting process controlled by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).has made it out of committee and is expected to come to a vote in the House in the coming weeks. Michael Skelly, the CEO of Grid United and a proponent of the reform, appreciates the attempt to speed up the process, saying, “It’s so difficult to go through NEPA, it’s so costly on the front end and it’s so risky on the back end, that most people don’t even try.” And when they do, it takes so long to get through the process that, “by the time you come out the other side, the world has changed and you might want to change your project,” but going through it all over again is too arduous to be worth it. Opponents such as Stephen Schima, senior legislative council for Earthjustice Action, said, “it’s things like changes in project design, local and state regulations, failures of applicants to provide necessary information, lack of funding, lack of staff and resources at the agencies. It’s not the law itself.” Additionally opponents point to the reluctance of the Trump administration to approve clean energy project permits, or to lallow already-permitted projects to proceed.
An alternative reform , known as the Cheap Energy Act, proposed by Reps. Sean Casten and Mike Levin, takes a very different approach, seeking to identify the barriers to deploying cheap energy and craft policy that helps consumers gain access to cheap energy. One main barrier they’ve identified is the fact that the country is divided into energy producing regions, primarily Republican dominated, and energy consuming regions, with higher population density, that lean Democratic. However, when you separate clean energy from fossil energy, the environmental impacts are much lower, as are the construction costs, creating natural alliance between for example Iowa, an energy producing state, and Illinois, a large energy consumer, around the construction of high voltage transmission lines.
Climate News
Tehran is Running Out of Water
Due to a combination of intense drought and a long history of mismanagement, “Tehran — the richest city of Iran, the most politically powerful city with more than 15 million in the metropolitan — is facing day zero in a few days or a few weeks,” Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, told the ABC in November. Rainfall across much of the country is about 85 per cent below average, with the worst drought conditions in about 60 years taking hold. According to an iranian woman interviewed, offcials “simply appear on TV and say, ‘If it doesn’t rain till December, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran entirely.’ Read more.
Scientists at University College London (UCL) analysed satellite date from 2002–24 and found the results reveal climate breakdown that should be a clear “wake-up call” according to Mohammed Shamsudduha, professor of water crisis and risk reduction at UCL. “We’re no longer talking about limiting warming to 1.5C, we’re likely heading toward 2C above preindustrial levels, and we’re now witnessing the consequences.” Read more.
G20 Declaration Acknowledges Climate Change Despite US Objections
The November G20 Summit issued a declaration stressing the seriousness of climate change and the need to better adapt to it, praising ambitious targets to boost renewable energy and noting the punishing levels of debt service suffered by poor countries. All of this despite the pressure from the US, which did not attend the summit, and the lack of consensus when Argentina quit the negotiations. Read more.
James Hansen: It’s Worse Than We Think
At a recent public talk in Helsinki, Dr. Hansen presented research to explain the sudden spike in global temperatures during 2023-2024. He explained how current climate assessments miss critical signals and that humanity is heading toward well over two degrees Celsius of warming unless monumental changes are made. He also noted that the 1.5°C global warming level has for all practical purposes been reached.
Record Breaking Glacier Retreat Could Mean Accelerating Sea Level Rise
According to research published in the journal Nature Geoscience, more than five miles of glacial ice in Antarctica vanished in only two months, retreating 10 times as fast as the previous record. “The fact that it happened means that we need to understand where else it might occur, especially on the much larger glaciers further south on the main continent,” said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, co-author of the study. Read more.
The Current Cost of Climate Disruption
What happens when you add up the costs of the existing harms of climate change? A working paper prepared for the semi-annual Brookings Papers on Economic Activity conference and released as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research did just that. Using even “narrow accounting” — looking only at climate impacts from heat and extreme weather on household budgets and mortality — there were “sizable costs to U.S. households from recent climate change patterns.” They estimate that the cost per household could be between $400 and $900 per year, for a total of about $50 billion to $110 billion nationwide. Read more.
AI Governance Conference
Raj Padmanabhan attended the Governance/AI conference in San Jose, California in November along with over 700 folks from 48 States, and shared his notes, including: The sustainability panel at the conference focused on energy and water dependence in order to build out the data center infrastructure in the US. California is struggling to get enough energy, especially clean energy to power data centers. Texas is all-in but heavily reliant on fossil energy sources. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan announced AI for All initiative for residents in partnership with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Silicon Valley is way ahead of the game in rolling this out. The GovAI Coalition has done some amazing work in scaling efforts to increase AI public sector awareness and adoption.
Industrial Polluters Are Underreporting Their Emissions
Long-suspected and now confirmed, some large polluters in the US have been underestimating their emissions, according to air monitor records from coke manufacturers, chemical plants and other industrial facilities viewed by ProPublica for it’s reporting. Now the Trump administration has halted rules requiring more than 130 industrial plants to install air monitors and comply with new emission standards. Read more.
Book Recommendation
The Problem with Plastic emphasizes the urgent need for action against plastic’s toxic legacy, and offers readers practical, actionable solutions, including a “household waste audit,” which empowers readers to track and reduce their own plastic consumption. Check out this interview with the author.
Minerva Ventures LLC believes:
MV and our team believe in the US Constitution and the importance of upholding the rule of law, including the rights of freedom of speech and assembly to ensure a vibrant democracy. We believe in the necessity for sound scientific research to guide policy and risk assessment. We believe that a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives makes our society more creative and resilient. Our culture, economy, and well-being depend on collaboration with people, nations, and institutions around the world. We will do all we can to defeat fascism and to build an inclusive society that works to restore healthy ecosystems, welcoming communities, and a safe and stable climate. Humanity faces challenges that we humans set into motion. It will take all of us working together to overcome those perils to build a better future.
About Minerva Ventures:
Are you concerned about climate change and seeking ways to take action? Business survival depends on addressing competitive challenges every day. Leaders attend to urgent business matters while counting on tomorrow’s weather and operating conditions to be similar to yesterday’s. What happens when underlying conditions change as climate consequences become more severe? It is hard to adjust to a disruptive future while you are focused on competing today.
Minerva advises clean tech companies on strategic and business development. We help you find customers, new markets, and new investors to build your momentum and success. Minerva helps established companies create strategies to identify and contend with climate risks to your business. Discover how you can protect your operations, assets, products, and services. Understand how climate risk will affect your suppliers, customers, and partners. Determine how you can strengthen your company to navigate change and seize opportunities as markets reconfigure in the face of the coming changes. Find innovative ways to change your operations, products, and services to help address climate change. Consider policy measures that your industry can pursue that will help address shared risks.
Minerva can help you find new solutions that will make your business more resilient and adaptable to change. Your company will be advancing climate solutions rather than just reacting to disruptions to your industry and markets.
Visit Minerva Ventures’ website at MinervaVentures.com!
Newsletter Editor: Dinyah Rein, Consultant, Minerva Ventures, LLC
Managing Partner: Marianna Grossman, Minerva Ventures, LLC
Copyright (C) 2025 Minerva Ventures. All rights reserved.
Thanks for reading Minerva's View! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work
.